When Was Zero Discovered?
We’re not sure when exactly the number ‘zero’ was invented. It made shadowy appearances in the works of Babylonian mathematicians. Their works date back to the 3rd millennium BC. They knew how to differentiate 12 from 102 by introducing a ‘zero’ between ‘one’ and ‘two’ but for some strange reason nowhere, in their texts, ‘zero’ occurs at the end of a number. This makes things rather complicated; how could they tell the difference between ‘12’ and ‘120’ without putting a zero at the end of ‘one hundred and twenty’?
Later, the Greeks learned a lot from the Babylonians but for some inexplicable reason they didn’t adopt their number system which was more advanced than the Greek one. The Greek number system was even more cumbersome. Then the Indians learned what the Greeks knew and made on it. Zero appeared again during the 5th century AD in India in the works of Aryabatha. The concept of zero developed during the following centuries and by the 9th century, the mathematicians in India understood ‘zero’ and its properties well. Then the Arabs took the torch and worked further. An Arab mathematician Al’Khwarizmi expounded on the concept in his book written in the 12th century. Then the Europeans took charge of further development and ‘zero’ was defined as ‘additive identity’, which means it doesn’t affect the number to which it is added or subtracted.
